So — continuing my Festival Of 80s Art House Movies.

I’m not sure whether I’ve seen this one before. If I did, it was probably on like a bootlegged VHS when I was 15?

All these hallways and doorways…

This is what I want my bedroom to look like!

This 4K bluray has been beautifully restored. This movie has probably never looked as good as this before. And soon, I’m guessing they’re going to stop restoring movies this painstaking way, and instead ask an LLM to do it: “Hallucinate this movie as if it were 4K” and then all movies will feature Nick Cage.

That’s the best-trained dog actor ever.

It’s so weird seeing Erland Josefsson in this — not because of the Italian that’s on the soundtrack, but because I’m constantly hearing his lines in his own voice instead of the one they’ve dubbed him into. I can tell by his mouth movements that he’s actually delivering the lines in Italian, but of course, at this time they didn’t actually record any sound on sets in Italy, so it’s all dubbed, but they’ve got a voice actor that sounds nothing like him.

It’s so weird — I’ve seen him in so many movies that his voice and very distinctive delivery is just a natural phenomenon to me, and it’s missing here.

Tarkovsky’s tableaux usually look so striking, so it’s jarring when you get something kike this, where it looks kinda like a parody of a Tarkovsky scene…

I wonder what the story behind this one is. There’s so many shots reminiscent of Tarkovsky’s previous movies — it’s like the producers told him “we really liked Stalker! Make a movie with all those scenes! But make a new story!” And so we ended up with a kind of … post-landing-on-Solaris thing, but very wet.

Ok ok, it’s probably not that at all — what with the main character being a Russian author called “Andrei”.

Almost every shot here is stunning… and the storyline kinda peters out. But it’s still a great movie.

Heh heh:

Vincent Canby of The New York Times said that Tarkovsky “may well be a film poet but he’s a film poet with a tiny vocabulary. […] Nothing happens.” Dave Kehr was mildly positive, considering it to be “packed with imagery that seems at once hopelessly obscure and crushingly obvious” while also arguing that the work “does succeed in inducing some kind of trance.

Anyway:

Nostalghia. Andrei Tarkovsky. 1983. ⚅

Oh, wow.

OK, I’m continuing my Festival of 80s Cinematheque Favourites… but I’m not sure I ever saw this one at the time?

It’s very Greenaway… I guessing this is before The Cook, The Thief, His Wife And Her Etc? That was his first … well, not exactly mainstream success, but that movie definitely made a splash, and I see people still referencing it on the Twitters.

And looking at his movies:

That movie also marked the end of his run of movies that were notable, really? I guess Prospero’s Books was also notable… Oh, and I’ve heard people mentioning The Pillow Book, too. So perhaps that’s just me. The Cook etc was the final movie of his I’ve seen. Perhaps I should fix that, even if I have been slightly disappointed wen rewatching his 80s movies.

I wonder what that German Twitter account (i.e., @dieworkwear) would say of this suit… I mean, both buttons are er buttoned.

*gasp* COLLAR GAP

I was going to do a joke about “you can clearly see this is science fiction, because he got the copier to do what he wanted immediately”, but then I noticed that the original image wasn’t even facing the scanner in the snap above the above one.

I”M SUBMITTING THIS TO THE IMDB “GOOFS” PAGE NOW

As you’d expect with a Greenaway movie, this looks really good. But there’s the extra distancing thing going on here with many scenes being filmed without sound and then the dialogue is flown in afterwards (presumably because they’re using an Italian film crew?)…

I guess Brian Dennehy isn’t bad, really? He’s much better than I’d expect an American character actor to be in an European art movie.

Greenaway has the best set designers.

This is what I want my living room to look like.

Ah, so that’s how all those statues lost their noses…

Eh… I’m not really feeling this movie. I keep getting distracted because I’m not really interested in what’s happening? And like I said, Dennehy isn’t bad, but he isn’t fascinating, either. And he had to carry a lot of this movie.

The movie feels a bit flabby, which I don’t think you could say about Greenaway’s previous movies, really.

OK, I’m not quite sure what’s happening now, because I zoned out.

Heh.

OK, nice roll to those lapels… and no collar gap OH NO @dieworkwear HAS RUINED ME

Anyway, I was rather shocked by the totally hackneyed birth/death scene at the end? C’mon, Greenaway. You could do better.

The Belly of an Architect. Peter Greenaway. 1987. ⚂

Fuuuck! This bluray has been cut down to 16:9?

Well, that’s weird, but it’s not 16:9 in any case.

Boo!

Criterion! What the actual fuck!

Greatest actor ever.

Oh yeah… he wrote a number of things around this time that were all pretty spiffy, if I remember correctly? Or I might be.

I was pretty sure that I saw this at the time, but nothing here seems familiar… weird…

Heh heh. So meta.

Look at those colours. That lighting.

Just look at this.

This movie made a million European film nerds want to visit Texas.

Everything here looks just amazing — you can almost see the nine assistants standing just off camera with reflectors and stuff just to get this perfect light for this tiny shot. No modern movie looks like, what with the desaturation and digital cameras and GET OFF MY LAWN

Claire Denis worked on this, and I wonder how much input she had. Because some of these shots look quite Denis-ey.

I hope the Texas Tourist Board chipped in.

Bizarre.

Only Europeans make the US look this good.

That’s John Lurie!!!

That’s Nastassja Kinski!!!

Oh my god. Movies were so much prettier before digital colour grading.

This is such a gorgeous movie. And it’s kinda perfect until the final bits? But when we get to the monologue in the booth, it starts to feel as it’s flailing a bit?

But still. It’s a great movie.

Paris, Texas. Wim Wenders. 1984. ⚅